To the mainstream news, she’s the mother of three of Elon Musk’s children. To a certain type of extremely online Tumblr user in the year 2012, she once approximated God. Today, we take a challenging look at the strange tapestry of Grimes’s life and unearth stories about the Internet era that shaped millennials, pipelines to right-wing radicalization, and domestic abuse as a public spectacle. COME SEE A BIT FRUITY LIVE! Tickets are on sale here. :-) Listen to bonus episodes on Patreon! Thanks to today’s sponsors! Work smarter, not harder, with Factor meals ready in two minutes at https://www.factormeals.com/fruity50off. Start managing your money better and cancel unwanted expenses at https://www.rocketmoney.com/fruity. Subscribe to Taylor's journalism at User Mag. Subscribe to Kat's journalism at Spitfire News. Subscribe to Taylor's YouTube channel! Me on Instagram. A Bit Fruity on Instagram. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Grimes and why is she a complex figure?
I don't typically record, like, prefaces at the front of episodes, but as you can tell by the title, this is an episode about a one Grimes, someone who weaves a particularly and exhaustingly complicated web. even among the people we talk about on this show.
When we talk about celebrities, we're usually also talking about bigger forces at play, which stories about these famous people come to represent and which affect us all.
Grimes is someone who, in going from beloved Tumblr-era indie artist to abused accomplice of the world's richest man and shadow president, tells us stories about the internet era that shaped millennials, about pipelines to political radicalization, about domestic abuse. It's a rich and complicated text that I hope you find as interesting and perhaps challenging as I did while recording it.
So without further ado, just kidding, I do have one more thing to say. This spring, A Bit Fruity is hitting the road. I am so excited to be doing seven live podcast shows this coming May and June. in Toronto, Chicago, Philly, New York City, Seattle, LA, and Portland.
It'll be just like the podcast but you know live with Q&As, audience feedback, you know we can all hang out and there will be some special guests who you might recognize from this podcast. I am truly so excited. Tickets for those shows are now officially on sale and the link for those will be in the episode description. I can't wait to see you. I'm so excited. Okay, Grimes, I'm ready for you.
Hello, hello, and welcome back to A Bit Fruity. That was a Grimes tweet from last week. Thank you, thank you. Recently, the flyer for World Pride 2025, which is being held in Washington, D.C. this June, was released. And among the top billed performers is a one DJ, Claire Elise Boucher, known to most of us normals as Grimes.
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Chapter 2: What is Grimes's connection to the LGBTQ community?
People, especially gays, who, you know, are the only people paying attention to the flyer release for World Pride 2025, were not happy. Here's some comments on Instagram. There's no reason for her to be here. She's consistently complacent. We have a gay pop renaissance. There's plenty of people who could replace her.
Another says, I fear she may have destroyed her career by procreating with that thing. Another says, Next up, is J.K. Rowling doing a speech? We have more gay pop acts than ever, and you chose someone who ignored a man's fascist ideologies for a doomed relationship and a child.
Grimes is someone whose public image and art I have been personally, purposely avoiding for years, as both have gone down the tubes in a pretty dramatic and dark way. And as a little closeted gay boy who lived on Tumblr in 2012, I once loved Grimes. Those photo shoots of her with the, you know, DIY pink bangs are etched into the back of my brain like a tattoo I can't get rid of.
And so I'm really not enjoying any of this. But as someone who still, 13 years later, feeds off of pop culture and political news like a fish needs water, it's gotten increasingly difficult to avoid the train wreck my former mother has gotten herself wrapped up in. Every time she tweets, it's like adding a new car to the back of the pile. Grimes has obviously, well, not obviously.
Obviously, if you listen to this podcast a lot, not obviously, if you're out in the world touching grass, three children with Elon Musk. And though they've long since split up and have also had a grisly custody battle, it still seems like they play an important role in one another's lives.
And despite early signs that Grimes might have been putting up a fight against Elon Musk's political swerve to the far right, time has shown that she is willing to ignore and often co-sign her ex-partner's beliefs. I think talking about Grimes will in some ways follow the script of a conversation about a pop cultural fall from grace, you know, those types of conversations that everybody loves.
But with the Elon of it all, and of course, the techno-mechanicus of it all, we add in some harder questions about what it means to be a victim or a victimizer and who bears responsibility for what Grimes has become. Was that good?
That was really good. Really good.
Scripted that shit out. To do that, I would like to welcome back to the podcast two of my best friends and two people who you're intimately familiar with at this point, if you listen to this podcast often, Kat Tenbarge and Taylor Lorenz.
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Chapter 3: How did Tumblr culture shape Grimes's early career?
Who booked it? The guy who booked it. It's me. I just think that it's funny that there's nothing about the poster that's LGBTQ looking. Like it looks like a trashy rave poster.
I have news for you. You say it looks like a trashy rave poster. Have you been to a world pride? Have fun, everyone. Before we really get into today's episode, Kat and I want to do something that we have done on this podcast once before, and yet so many people didn't listen. Kat, would you like to do the vocal fry disclaimer?
Yes. So as a disclaimer, we don't care if you don't like vocal fry.
We don't care.
We get these comments every time we do an episode together, which are people will say like, wish I could listen to this, but this vocal fry is unlistable.
we we've talked about it multiple times now and we always usually get really helpful comments like there was one on a former video where someone basically pointed out that like like famous men will have vocal fry and no one will care but if like women or like femme coded people have vocal fry then all of a sudden everyone's like i just can't listen to this so yeah we don't care We don't care.
So before you leave that comment about how you love the content, but you can't listen to the vocal fry, delete that comment and go outside.
I have perfect speech. Is that all you have to contribute to that? Let me do the talking. No, I don't. I think that's misogynistic. I think the vocal fry, I get that too, but not as much.
I've gotten comments when we've done episodes that have been like, it's the battle of the vocal fry. And in my head, I'm like twiddling my thumbs and I'm like, who will win? Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What role did pseudo-intellectualism play in Grimes's public persona?
I saw this tweet the other day from someone named George Severus who wrote, small minds discuss people. Average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss celebs.
And that's what we're doing today. But celebrities are these sort of like they're a way to talk about culture and they're sort of manifestations of culture. And especially in America, where celebrity is so intertwined with culture, like we have such a celebrity obsessed culture and the way we process culture so much through celebrities. I think it's important to talk about.
A hundred percent. And Grimes is a rich text, if ever there was one. So Grimes was born in Vancouver, BC to wealthy parents. Her dad was a banker who then switched to biotech, which anyone out there who really knows what biotech is, feel free to leave a comment. I can't wait to read them. But she and her younger brother were raised Roman Catholic. Her parents divorced when she was 11.
Obviously, I'm like really speeding through the timeline of her early life. She ended up going to McGill University where she was a freshman in 2006. and I put in the outline a few photos that were unearthed from her time at McGill, if you guys want to look. I love these photos. She looks like Claro, or like a little, I don't know, she looks like a little Amish boy. It's very sweet.
And I feel like this is very much so her brand. She looks like a creature who lives in the woods.
Yes.
You can see it's always been there. Grimes says that she was expelled from McGill in 2010 for missing, at that point, a year of classes. But while she was still at McGill, she began releasing music on MySpace.
She formally released her first two albums, both in 2010, which were generally well received in some indie circles, and really had her breakthrough with fame with her 2012 album called Visions, which is most likely when, if you know who Grimes is, probably the first time you've heard about her.
Visions had the two songs Genesis and Oblivion on them, which were both critically acclaimed, put on all the year-end lists. Her sort of
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Chapter 5: How did Grimes and Elon Musk's relationship begin?
Well, because there wasn't much you could do with Tumblr fame aside from leverage it into some career. Like because you couldn't monetize yourself on the internet in the same way, Tumblr was this channel to music, right? Like you had people using that Tumblr clout to like
get their music out there and tumblr kind of like birthed so much of like millennial music culture or youtube like you blew up on tumblr jenna marbles was huge on tumblr tyler oakley was huge and then you would sort of like leverage it into youtube fame or what i did which is leverage it into a traditional media job the worst outcome. Probably the worst thing I could have done with that fame.
But like, I feel like Tumblr was this like creative soup and it birthed so many creative people. And I feel like so much of Grimes culture is wrapped up in that like early 2010s.
Taylor, you said that you did the worst thing you could have done with Tumblr fame, but I would argue that it's not as bad as what Grimes has ultimately done. True. Low hanging fruit.
I definitely listened to Grimes growing up in Ohio. and being like, wow, this music is so interesting. It's like nothing I've ever heard before. And I actually really bonded with one of my ex-girlfriends who I dated growing up in Ohio over Grimes. So I feel like that contributes to the gay teenager bedroom narrative.
I also found Grimes really interesting and resonant for me within that Tumblr culture, like specifically like
social justice warrior culture because Grimes would talk about like being a woman producer and like not being taken seriously because she was a woman and like not being viewed as like someone who was pioneering or popularizing like a very new style of music and also Oblivion I'm pretty sure has like something to do like the meaning of the song with like being assaulted or like being preyed on and so
I always think about that when I think about like the trajectory that her life took is that when she started out, I think maybe a lot of what she was saying and doing that like seemed progressive was like more pseudo intellectualism than actual progressivism.
But for a while, it felt like she was a part of the like more leftist, liberal side of the internet and famously like jumping ahead a little bit. But famously, her bio when she first started dating Elon was initially like pro communism.
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